ZylonBane on 18/11/2008 at 21:19

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Since Halo popularized the auto-regeneration mechanic, then yes, yes it does have to do with appealing to console gamers.

"Fucking health pack", as you so eloquently put it, comes down to one of the traditional elements of RPG gameplay-- resource management. Take that away and allow healing from an infinitely renewable resource (time), and you've dumbed down the game design by a small by noticeable amount.

By contrast, DX's regen aug: consumes energy, has to be chosen by the player, and is a high-level item.

BlackCapedManX on 19/11/2008 at 05:10

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In the hopes that Rene (and company) actually care about what the fans think in terms of serious crtique,

-LOS stealth: I've always played DX as though it were an LOS based awareness anyway (darkness indication didn't quite do it for me), so I'm actually not to concerned (personally) about the "switch," though AI sight distance and a more robust sound awareness will be paramount. For me, MGS translates well to first person (I've said it a billion places, I grew up on R6, and special agents don't hide in the shadows, they sneak up when you aren't looking and take you by surprise, so I just applied that thinking to DX) so if it actually functions like I'll be happy. Two points of note, however, I would be very wary about internal development confusing the idea of stealth with cover, cover is hiding from people who know you are there, stealth is not being seen in the first place (as far as making a more engaging AI, I'd like to see enemies that don't give up and wander away if you've ducked around a corner when they're chasing you.) The other point is that the total abolishment of "shadow based" stealth smack more of laziness than intent. Like "we can't be bothered to do it, no matter how much you people who like the game actually might think it's important." If they actually code an honest-to-god MGS-style-but-way-better stealth system, I'll be happy. If enemies are simply oblivious until you happen to be in the same hallway as them, and then it turns into a shooter, I'll be pissed hell ass off.

-Third Person "Contextual" elements: important conversations in DX booted you to 3rd person. This worked. It worked because it was simple and unintrusive and furthered the game progression (you couldn't simply walk away from a vital convo.) A non-successful solution was what they did TES4 ("oh shit it's a face!" *zoooom* "I see you now, let us talk" yeah sure.) Another thing TES4 did that was really dumb was take you into 3rdP to watch your body fall, then put you back into first after your character stood up. That was a "hey, look how cool our ragdoll physics are, am i rite?" moment, and totally broke immersion, and was kind of unbeleivable to watch anyway (when I'm knocked over by something, I don't just go limp and fall, wait until I land in a heap, then get back up, you naturally resist the impact, because you're made of muscles and tendons, not yarn-joints, when someone finally invents "torsion-doll" it'll be far more realistic.) If DX3 has "cool stuffs" that it goes into 3rdP to watch the character do something you pressed a button to tell him to do, it may look nice, but it runs totally counter to what DX set forth, which was a doctrine of player decision, not player obedience. For example (which probably won't be totally congruent, but is the closest I can think of in DX) if you turned on cloak, and it switched to 3rdP to watch your hazy outline pass an unsuspecting guard, it might be fun to watch once... maybe twice, but then it would just get dumb (or press a button and watch JC snap a guard's neck with the strength aug, or whatver), and with repitition it becomes very gimmicky and maybe annoying. Tenchu is a good example of this, nearly every one of the stealth kills are absolutely badass, but when you've seen the exact same animation 300 times, because the game necessitates that you do them (and they're an integral part of the game) it gets excessive. And unless you have programmers who want to code thousands of subtly different nuances to these 3rd animations for every conceivable context, it's going to feel repetitive.

The "less shown is more profound" philiosphy holds very true here, the player can figure out that they're doing something awesome without watching a movie of it, and a 3rdP toggle means if they want to watch said movie, it's at their discretion. A more elegant solution (utilized frequently in the MGS universe) to showing you how awesome something is, is to have other characters do it (this is why you never play a cyborg ninja in the series, the awesome things they do feel less awesome when they're given player constraints, or if you could play as one and were simply omnipotent, you'd have a boring, repetitive game.) All that said, if these "contextual" 3rd person "pull outs" are subtle and don't interfere too much with the flow of the game, go for it. It just sounds more like you have a bunch of animators who really want to show off what awesome things your character can do, but if we want to see a main character do something cool we watch movies, if we're playing a first person game, it's because we want to do those cool things. Many of the most awesome moments and things you could do in DX were very low on visual cues and were often very awkward, but they fact that they were entirely player driven with no moments where the game took control for you were what made them key. Personal favorite: grenade climbing up a building opposite Maggie Chow's appartment, jumping onto her roof, breaking the skywindow over her head, falling onto her shoulders and stabbing her in the neck ninja-assassin style, then running out the bay window and leaping across to Jock's apartment. Sure, this would have made an awesome cutscene, and the actual animation for it was not at all fluid, but it was way more awesome that I actually got to do it first hand. And it's something the game and designers probably didn't predict, which is that much more rewarding. 3rdP "actions" smack of little mini-scripted events, which absolutely break a game like DX.

-"Different ways to solve any objective depending on your play style (social, hacking, stealth, or action)": I'm wary of this wording, because it makes it out like the game is going to have all possible routes neatly sectioned into tidy little pre-fab paths for you. It sounds a lot like they're scripting out all of your approaches and saying "lookit 'ere! ye gotch yer social approach, yer hackin' approach (mind the cold there boyo), yer sneaky-type go around, and ye kin jest shoot up the place if it pleases ye, which door will it beeee?" which is also quite contrary to DX, which simply had a widely enough ranged set of principles and sort of let you go from there. It didn't say "this is your social interaction possibility, would you like to use it and avoid this fight?" it just sort of threw shit in there and if you found it and used it, awesome, if not, you might next time around (precisely why there was a next time around). And a lot of what you could do in DX was redunant, you could get the same codes, or locations of people, 3 or 4 different times, because the designers didn't say "okay, if you want to do it like this, go here, this is social" they said "here's 20 people, talk to some of them, a couple might know where Nicolette DuClare is, or, I mean go ahead and look yourself. Or kill everybody, that works too, whatever you want man, we're not giving you instructions." There's a difference between having an open free-form environment, and having a sharp segregation of options, to give the illusion of player freedom, and my fear (which right now is all it is, but it was a fear that held from DXIW) is that in an attempt to grasp at "what DX is" devs have bundled up these "ideas" and made them an orderly "this-that-or-the-other-thing" kind of deal. DX worked so well because it was so messy. Which is probably harder to pull off, but that's what you should be thinking about when you want to take on the DX namesake.

-Shooting "Accuracy": If you're playing, say TES and you're a longswordsman and you don't know diddly shit about maces, no one complains if you pick up a mace and can't do a spot of damage with it, because you're not skilled in such things. In DX, it's possible to start off the game with no weapon skills (save trained in pistol, which if you put the laser sight on your standard pistol, is all you'll ever need). You say "but JCD is an elite government agent, surely he can shoot a gun straight!" On a scale of realism, shooting on the move is hard as fuck for anyone, but on top of that there are two points countering this line of thought. You start with enough skill points to raise any one skill to at least "experienced," which for an agent fresh out of the academy is probably quite reasonable. But JCD is also a highly specialized "prototype" agent, who knows what kind of craziness they've been teaching him? Maybe he spent his entire time in the academy swimming and hacking computers, and the only time he touched a gun was when he ran the training course. Whatever it is, DX lets you figure that out, and if you think you need weapon proficiency (maybe JC just wanted too shoot rockets all the time, not knowing the only use he'd get out of that is one of the most limit ammo weapons in the game and a ridiculously murderous flamethrower) you can certainly choose what area of skill you deem appropriate with the skill points the provide at the beginning of the game.

For your average player who's not quite bright enough to realize that if you want to shoot guns, you have to role-play as someone with those skills, a simple fix is to separate the combat and non-combat skills and award points specific to each set. This isn't optimal to the fully free range players, who very well may want to go totally non-combat and use all their skill points for that (though maybe you only get combat skill points in combat scenarios, so maybe you wouldn't be missing anything, or maybe you also get a generic skill point pool, so some award could go to either, I'm trying to throw out good ideas for you folks here, more options is always better.) After all, isn't the main character in DX just some average Joe at a science lab who gets rubbed the wrong way? Why would he, with no prior knowledge, be able to weild prototype weaponry, rifles, pistols, a range of melee weapons, grenades, and whatever else with surgical precision just because he's the main character? If your answer is the same as Half-Life's, and it;s "because this is a shooter silly" than you are clearly making the wrong game. Also, if there are no skills in the game.. then you are stupid, stupid, filthy fucking liars who haven't learned a single goddamn thing from Invisible War and you should choke on the acidic bile that's been forming in your heathenous guts everytime you've said "RPG" and die a caustic agonizing death. Ahem. Just saying.

-Hacking: Sounds good. While I prefer to think that JC had something in that infochip in his head that turns all computers in the world into simple and clutter-free interfaces (much in the same way that Space Ghost has "a massive brain that can turn any complex equation into a simple 'yes' or 'no'"... props if you know the reference) it did leave something to be desired. Something that I'm pretty sure hasn't been seens since the like of SS1. If hacking is anything like some Gibson-esque trippy psychodelic cyberspace dream, then all other sins are forgiven and I will buy the game on that account alone. Otherwise, you can't really go anywhere from DX but up, and if you have a derisive view of Bioshock hacking and still have a hacking... thing, then I'll be pleased with pretty much anything.

-Boss Fights: we'll see. If there are any campy "use this environmental hazard as your only means to kill this boss" sequences then you will be, again, liars. If bosses are just capital enemies, but with otherwise little distinction, it'll be okay. If they have ungodly amounts of health for no apparent reason, then you're making a shooter, and are in the wrong genre. DX's most difficult enemies, arguably, were probably the MIB, which had only reasonably more health than you, but weren't to different from the "bosses" in terms of weapon accessories and life. With a maxed out rifle skill and lvl4 targeting aug, Simons took two headshots to kill with the sniper rifles. This is reasonable. If "Barrett"whatever takes 20-odd headshots from a similar setup (I would suggest the maxed out rifle skill as a key indicator of what I'm getting at) then you're drifting into unclear waters (i.e. figure what game you're making, and don't call it DX, this isn't Far Cry or GoW.) The highest health enemies in the game (the military bots) had simple work arounds, and bosses should be treated in much the same way (I mean, Howard Strong technically is a boss, and he has less health than most late game enemies.)

-Conclussion: So yeah. I would hope that Rene floats around here to actually see what we have to say, and not simply defend his game to an increasingly irate support base who're very concerned about what's actually being done with a franchise we care deeply about. I think the people who actually like DX for it's original qualities have been saying for 8 years what's good about the game, and why few games have come close since then, and we're displaced because of the fear that game designers, in an effort to tap into the essence of one of the best games ever made, are simply bundling up elements of DX and dumping them on a shooter and calling it an RPG. I will and do stress skills, again, because that's how RPGs work, even (especially) with weapons, you choose which weapons you are skilled with. It's called customization. That's a ROLE, which a major part of the formula of a Game where you Play Roles (see what I did there?) Simple. Makes it kind of ridiculous that IW didn't have this. Would be ridiculous if DX3 doesn't either.

DDL on 19/11/2008 at 12:19

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How does that work? I mean, physically?

Or are we expecting something like this:

"The 'third arm' augmentation, while far from subtle, is otherwise fairly self explanatory. Installation of this augmentation allows you to throw grenades without having to put away your gun. Also handy for cooking, cleaning, holding a Xbox Controller properly, and..other things"

EvaUnit02 on 19/11/2008 at 12:48

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CoD2 onwards were designed foremost for consoles. CoD2 is also a post-Halo 2 title.

I played through Allied Assault + both expansions recently and Jesus were they extremely difficult. Ironsight aiming + Riddick's health system would've been a godsend (Incidentally MoH:Airborne did precisely this.). Ditto for FarCry 1's insanely unbalanced harder difficulties. AA's Snipertown was entirely an exercise in mashing quicksave + quickload dozens of times.

BlackCapedManX on 20/11/2008 at 10:05

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Agreed, it's been something of a modern shooter convention that having to select a separate weapon to use grenades is detrimental to gameplay flow, and simply having a "throw selected grenade" button has been a workable fix.

On the otherhand, the grenades in DX have a fascinating tactical component that makes them somewhat more involved than your typicial shooter grenade (IW's splitting of the thrown and sticky grenades into two groups was a sin), and I think that the DX grenades warrent the time to be selected as an item. Turning grenades into merely something to be used in the midst of battle makes them far less interesting (a reasonable alternative solution would've been to simply have more 20mm ammo, because the switch from 7.62 to 20mm in the assault rifle is fairly painless.)